Plus new multichannel audio options.

In response to the OpenIV developer's ill-fated 'Liberty City in GTA 5' project, Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two issued a cease and desist order on OpenIV itself last year. The game's community reacted, and the prolific modding tool was thereafter reinstalled—at the expense of the ambitious (but hobbyist) Liberty City undertaking.

OpenIV's latest update, v3.0, is its biggest since last year's debacle.

"As our first step in GTA 5 Animations support, we added new feature for playing vehicles animations," reads this blog update. "In the model viewer if vehicle has animation you will see controls for playing it. You can play animation forwards and backwards."

That looks something like this:

The dev team promises to support GTA 5 animations down the line with a "cutscenes player and openFormats support in the future". Likewise, multichannel audio support lets players configure how OpenIV plays multichannel audio by selecting mono, stereo and/or multichannel modes.

"To provide the best experience for all users option is set to 'Play multichannel audio in stereo mode' for default," the posts adds. "This option only affects audio playback in the OpenIV’s tools such as Audio Player and GTA IV Cutscene Player, the export functionality is not changed. OpenIV Audio Player is now also has ability to export multichannel audio in stereo or mono mode."

OpenIV v3.0 also promises PlayStation 4 support, something its creators assumed wasn't possible. As PC players, this doesn't have a huge bearing on us—but as someone who enjoys mucking around with GTA 5's most inventive player-made creations, I'd love to see more people contributing cool things. As you might expect, features to this end are limited for now. Here's a visual rundown of OpenIV's latest additions: